| Some Goldman-Sachs and Sergey Aleynikov |
[Jul. 10th, 2009|01:35 pm] |
One of the people on my friend's list, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) autopope, recently posted this DailyKos article about how Goldman-Sachs might have been . . . well, cheating by using fast software to to read the NYSE's routers' private information and make orders before other people did. Some crazy numbers have been tossed around, that GS might have been "earning" up to $100,000,000 a day through these electronic shenanigans.
It all started when Sergey Aleynikov was arrested for stealing some of Goldman-Sach's code that allowed it to get the jump on investors. Aleynikov, apparently, left his $400,000/year job with GS to take a $1,200,000/year job with a start-up in Chicago. Leaving GS, he took some code with him and uploaded it to a server in Germany (where it apparently still resides). (Here's a Bloomberg article on the matter.) A government lawyer in the Aleynikov case said the code could be used to "manipulate the market in unfair ways" if the wrong people got their hands on it. You know, an unscrupulous person could read supposedly private information off the NYSE routers and then use superfast electronic agents to buy or sell on the basis of those supposedly private communications. Which is a species of insider trading, and a few other things beside . . . which is just what some people have been saying Goldman-Sachs was doing to the tune of a hundred million a day. (Here's a Zero Hedge story about it, and good luck parsing it.)
Some folks are saying it could spell doom for Goldman-Sachs because, y'know, wow, stealing a hundred million a day! My thoughts are . . . no. While the DailyKos guys think that this is shenanigans because Goldman-Sachs has unique access to the NYSE's routers, the general thrust of what Goldman-Sachs did is extremely common. Using high speed computer software to get the drop on investors is routine in stock brokerage. And because the NYSE wants to keep all of this black box technology, they're going to resist talking about what Goldman-Sachs may have been seeing with their software. (Also expect GS to fight tooth and claw to make sure the details of the software don't get out. I suspect they'd rather Aleynikov go free than reveal what their code reveals in public court.)
(And I disagree that what GS did is dodgy only if they spied on other companies. I think the whole process is dodgy. Server farmers exist that do nothing but analyze computer data so people with really fast systems can, in the fractions of a second before an order is made and an order is processed by the NYSE, buy or sell ahead of the initial order. It reminds me of one kid reaching for the last piece of pizza and another kid snatching it away before the first kid got it - the sign of a petty, juvenile person. My understanding of this system is also what made me reconsider the idea that banks and brokers and their ilk were wise and wonderful people doing their dead level best to create a financial system that was secure and durable. Instead, they're a bunch of hucksters willing to do anything for a quick buck.)
The reason the story won't take off in a legal sense, and I hope I'm wrong about this, is threefold. First, if GS does it, over companies do it. They won't want the government looking into these black box routers and programs that govern the stock market because, if that happens, we're likely to learn that almost all the "gains" in the stock market are fictional, based off of computers trading nothing back and forth at light speed. They'll collude with each other to stop it. So, there's that. Second, the actual statement that started this in the first place was a government lawyer trying to get a judge to deny bail to Sergey Aleynikov. He offered no proof. Which is a fairly big deal in court cases like this (where rich people are involved; the rules of evidence diminish drastically if you're poor and especially so if you're not white . . . suddenly, hearsay jailhouse testimony of convicts who are getting bribed to testify meets evidential standards. But that's another rant). Third, the government would look like suckers in a big way after giving trillions to Wall Street banks who are involved in crazy insider trading schemes. The government has put a huge amount of resources into supporting the idea that Wall Street is trustworthy, that the collapse of the housing market and global economy wasn't the fault of Wall Street. The Obama administration's credibility is deeply invested in Wall Street and I don't think they'll want to risk that credibility by pursuing this case aggressively. Oh, they'll hit Aleynikov pretty hard because he had the bad taste to steal from Goldman Sachs. But Goldman Sachs, itself? Well, it's too big to fail.
And maybe a fourth - the matter is reasonably complex. Which is one of Wall Street's best tricks - they make things so complex sounding that almost no one can put in the time and effort to understand them. If the issue was Goldman-Sachs bugging people's telephones and listening to orders being made and on the basis of that snooping buying or selling stocks, people would understand the issue at once. But using low latency computers to detect market sales in a black box router system for the NYSE isn't something that most people will instantly understand. So the fact that much of our stock market system is based on this gray area of the law around computer and Internet technologies and the vast amounts of automated banking that goes on globally, which is itself a difficult for people to understand - most people will shy away from the fact that most stock transactions are made entirely automatically, without the least bit of human interference, that robots do most of the buying and selling of stocks - well, it lets these investment banks, insurance companies and their ilk to get away with a lot. They simply do no want people able to understand what is going on. And not in the sense that it is necessarily complex like, say, quantum physics. But in the sense of something that is basically simple being made complex through a variety of shenanigans, covered up with jargon and masked by secrecy. The last thing these cats want is for people outside the industry to have a good understanding of how the industry works, because the industry works in such a way as to give people the shaft. So they lie and hide. Which is also a problem in understanding this nonsense.
I hope I'm wrong and the government goes after Goldman-Sachs with a hatchet and extreme prejudice. But I don't think that'll happen. It hasn't happened so far. There has been no real government investigation into the financial practices of the banking, brokerage and insurance firms that have screwed the global economy. Indeed, overwhelmingly, they've been rewarded with truly massive government subsidies. The government has no will to look into the hidden business practices of Wall Street firms. They won't. |
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| Foamed butter |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|05:59 pm] |
I made a hollandaise sauce. It was the first time I'd ever done it. I got a double boiler and one of those electric wand mixer things because I didn't want to have to whip for fifteen minutes. Well, I got everything ready and did it.
Ohmygod, I rock. It was an artichoke hollandaise out of my Louisana cookbook. But . . . hollandaise is foamed butter, really. I mean, look at this recipe list: 2 artichoke hearts, 2 tablespoons finely chopped onions, 3 egg yolks, four tablespoons water, two tablespoons white wine, a teaspoon of Tabasco, half a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce and . . . three sticks plus two tablespoons of butter and four tablespoons of margarine. Almost a full pound of butter and margarine, yeah. So, hollandaise is flavored butter with just enough egg yolk to foam it out really well.
It is inhumanly delicious though. I had it with English muffins with egg, asparagus and tomato. It was . . . just wonderful.
But now I have two cups of hollandaise and I am skerred of it. It's so good and so bad at the same time! |
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| The revolution won't be Twittered, either |
[Jul. 3rd, 2009|11:44 am] |
I'm not actually sure that the Internet is spreading knowledge. I've come up against a lot of Wikipedia scholars who will cherry pick quotes to back their point, who will C&P definitions from Dictionary.com in substitute for a real argument - there are a whole list of Internet fallacies that I've never seen in real life (my "favorite" being the Internet straw man fallacy fallacy where any argument you make against a person is called a straw man even when it clearly is nothing of the sort - but since the straw man fallacy is fairly subjective to begin with they can just repeat it as a way of dismissing what someone else says; in this form, it serves as a conversation stopper and a logical fallacy - there are many others). So, while it puts some people in touch with information, it puts other people in touch with disinformation and outright lies presented as truth without there being a really good way to separate the signal from the noise.
So, when the Twitter crowd when ga-ga about the "Green Revolution" over in Iran, I . . . found myself rolling my eyes. Twitter is perhaps the most vapid form of communication known to humanity. By design, it can't communicate anything more than 140 characters long. Not even 140 words, but characters. I think the whole phenomenon of Twitter is anti-communication, where words are used by meaning never revealed.
While there was a brief wave of Twitters about Iran and some people might have worn green for a day or two, what I think is it really just shows to what extent groupthink is part of Internet culture - because that focus on Iran was, itself, a result of government and media focus. The people on Twitter twittered about Iran because the government and press were putting that in the news. It is irrelevant to the US government whether Ahmadinejad won the election or not and we have no real way to tell. What should be clear to anyone with a mind is that the US government is support Mousavi is based around creating political instability in Iran (something the US has been doing for a long time, since the 50s) so we can overthrow (or assist in the overthrown) of a government hostile to the US and (more importantly) US business interests.
While this was going on, Manuel Zelaya has been deposed in a military coup in Honduras. To the extent that the press has covered it, it has represented Zelaya as a bad leader, and maybe he was (he was about as popular as George Bush was at the end of his presidency) but the way to solve it is a military coup? And it is a military coup. The Honduran military is running it out of the military coup playbook, controlling (and largely shutting down) TV and radio stations, phone service, electricity and strict curfews. Twitter is silent about this.
Apparently, some of the guys down at BoRev.net agree, which is why when they say, "Thousands of Zelaya supporters are apparently dodging bullets in the streets, which is sort of like Twittering, for poor people" I got a laugh. In a black humor sort of way.
(The piece also has some juicy quotes from US press about the coup where they say stuff like he was going to "scrap the constitution" because he wanted a non-binding referendum that would ask the voters if they wanted to write a new constitution for Honduras. The American press is great at transforming molehills into mountains. A non-binding referendum gets transformed into some kind of anti-democratic process. It's anti-democratic to vote whether you want to change the constitution . . . ?) |
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| I really dislike the WSWS's arts reviews |
[Jul. 1st, 2009|12:24 pm] |
I really hate reading The World Socialist Website's arts reviews. Most recently, David Walsh - their go-to guy for most of their media reporting - reviewed Sonderbergh's "A Girlfriend Experience". First off, he doesn't actually like anything unless it's done by non-Americans or is an unwatchable art house movie, which disturbs me because those movies generally seem intensely bourgeoisie. If you're in Pakistan and you're making a big screen movie for art house audiences, c'mon, David, it's not the working class behind it! But time and again, he gets sucked by their bougie movies. This leads to the second general problem I have with his reviews, that he never likes things actual working class likes. So, once again, you have this college educated middle-class white man "socialist" telling the working class that they're wrong and the problem is that they don't behave enough like college educated middle-class white men. Shocker. The problem is, of course, with the working class behaving badly. Who knew?
But the problem that gets me almost every time he writes something is he criticizes the art. "[Sonderbergh] advertising a complete lack of perspective will not disturb many critics or commentators at present, but we would venture to argue that it is not artistically or intellectually healthy," he says.
Artistically healthy? He talks like this all the time. When he doesn't like something, it's not enough that he just doesn't like it. Many of the criticisms that he levels about "The Girlfriend Experience" would well be valid, the movie is apparently distant and coldly cerebral. I can certainly understand not liking that. It might also be a bad movie - even talented directors like Sonderbergh will occasionally misstep. It isn't that the Walsh doesn't like the movie, or that the movie might be bad, he arrogates to speak for art itself. The movie is not artistically healthy because, y'know, Sonderbergh doesn't make it the way Walsh would make it. Y'know. If Walsh made movies. Walsh can, however, confidently speak for art itself.
For my part, as an artist who has put a little bit of thinking into both art and socialism and post-democratic forms of government, it is my understanding that in the socialist paradise where the workers ran things, it would be the workers who decide what they do. That's how I read it. That there wouldn't be this big ol' authority figure over everyone all the time telling them what was right and what was wrong, that the artists could get with other artists and other people and work that out amongst themselves. Socialism, by my reading, is supposed to make people freer. If it doesn't, if all it does is replace one idiotic orthodoxy with another idiotic orthodoxy, the orthodoxy of capitalism profitability that currently rules movies with an iron fist with the orthodoxy of art critics defining the acceptable parameters of art, why bother? But when Walsh says stuff like movies like this are not artistically healthy, I can't help but think of the socialist and communist governments that savagely repressed artists with precisely that kind of criticism. That art the state disapproved was sick and degenerate because it didn't express the "worker's ideals" . . . oh, we'll leave out the fact that the workers might love the art, that it's really popular with the actual workers, but since it doesn't meet some political hack's definition of what art "should be", well, a whole bunch of artists were sent to prison camps, mental institutions or behind the barn to get a slug in the head. Given that history, that real history of governments that were based on the same ideological basis as David Walsh draws his critiques, given the brutality used to control art in the former USSR, in China, Cuba, Vietnam and other places where a "socialist revolution" has taken over the state . . . given this reality, Walsh's arrogance to speak for art itself is something I find really profoundly and deeply offensive.
But it goes on all the time on WSWS.org's arts reviews. The reviewer will not just dislike the art reviewed, but will turn their dislike into a big ol' universal political statement and waggle their finger at the artist for not meeting their criteria of artistic responsibility. Emma Goldman said that she didn't want to be part of any revolution where you can't dance. I don't want to be part of any revolution where people tell me how to dance. So, fuck 'em. |
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| Pastrami and beer |
[Jun. 27th, 2009|11:14 pm] |
Because Adrienne is away, she's reading my LJ to get an idea of what's going on in my life. We chat most days so it isn't like we're totally out of communications, and we've spoken a couple of time since she left - only eight more weeks! - but I might talk about my personal life a little bit more so she hears about it at her convenience. ;) Nothing really deep, of course, I'll save that to talk to her directly, but more general stuff that's going on that isn't terribly personal.
Well, I made the pastrami out of the corned beef I made. The good news! The meat is, in fact, more tractable than when I made it out of the store bought corned beef. It slices much easier and has less gristle. The bad news is that it was still pretty salty. The problem is that the pastrami rub is real salty and I was using the same batch of rub that I used last time. Next time, I'll make it without any salt and, I think, some brown sugar. I think that'll make it nearly perfect. I'll also be buying an electric knife which should make cutting the pastrami much easier (brisket is still a reasonably touch cut of meat, tho' I'm also thinking of trying this with tri-tip). Still, my friend Peter tried it and was pretty blown away. Apparently I make a pretty good batch of pastrami. And on sandwiches, the saltiness wasn't too much of an issue, tho' I still want for there to be less saltiness.
Also, today, we cracked open the first bottles of beer of the most recent batch. Yum! I make a fine batch of beer which is a nut brown ale. The current batch is not particularly bitter - I'm not a fan of bitter beer - and it has a good mouth feel and is really smooth. It's a real drinkable beer at around 7% alcohol content by volume. It came out pretty top notch. So I'm pleased with that and, y'know, it means that I have five gallons of good beer. I am, in fact, a little tipsy as I write this. Yay! Go, beer! |
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| The Wickerest Man |
[Jun. 26th, 2009|11:19 pm] |
I just got done watching the remake of the 1973 film, The Wicker Man, called, yes, The Wicker Man.
When I saw the '73 movie, I was reasonably mortified. Not because the movie was scary. Despite it being considered by many to be one of the greatest horror films of all time the first 2/3rds is so . . . idiotic, I mean, just banal and foolish that the culmination in the murder of the policeman mostly got me to giggle a little. What mortified me was, y'know, the ridiculous anti-paganism of the movie. As an atheist, of course I think most religions are more or less equally stupid. Certainly this is true of modern paganism. But in '73 there were real, well, witch hunts going on. People were accusing "Satanists" - many of them pagans and not even believing that Satan existed, but obviously all coming from a very Christian paradigm - of various ritual crimes such as pedophilia and murder (some of this still goes on today, of course). And while I might think paganism is roughly as goofy as Christianity, there was persecution against pagans, so a movie about Celtic pagans who ritualistically torture and murder people is in pretty bad taste. It'd be akin to making a movie about medieval Jews who steal Christian babies for sacrifice.
So, given that the movie was bad and offensive, I saw no reason for a remake. I would not have seen the remake if not for Rifftrax, Netflix and the ten week separation from my wife. Boredom and loneliness do weird things to a guy.
Many people think the remake of The Wicker Man is worse than the original. Uh, to me it's, at worst, a lateral move. The remake is not good, but the original was not good! The remake, however, does something that the original did not - it throws in huge slabs of anti-feminism. The pagans are all women, the men literally mute except for the policeman who has been tricked into going there, and . . . they are caricatures of feminist paganism, man-hating, presented as prudish and sex-hating. So, y'know, it took the offensive slanders of the original and amped 'em up to 11.
But, hey, with a Rifftrax, I laughed my ass off. |
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| Rest in peace, Michael |
[Jun. 26th, 2009|02:05 pm] |
I'm listening to Thriller right now. I've been going through the admittedly few Michael Jackson albums I have. A lot of people - and I will dare and say white people - are going to view the death of Michael Jackson with sniggering contempt. They're going to focus on the horrorshow that his life has been for the past couple of decades. None of them will say, y'know, he was one of the greatest musical talents of the 20th century and a performer of rare ability. He had amazing talent which he squandered in the last years of his life. He did more for racial integration than virtually any other human alive - something that almost no one will remember, how he united people with song. He was also chased by demons and the demons caught him and did not let go.
Michael Jackson's life terrifies me because I feel at my heels the same demons nipping. Michael Jackson's childhood was tortured. I don't mean that in a metaphorical sense but in the sense that Joe Jackson literally tortured his children. Even beyond how Joe Jackson thrust his children into a role that he never succeeded entirely too early, he physically and psychologically abused his children. Later in life, as a grown adult, as a famous and rich man, Michael still literally trembled at thoughts of his father. The tortures of his youth . . . he never got over them.
He had everything. He was a handsome man (before his surgical addiction, anyway), wealthy, successful, he had the deep and abiding respect of his peers and tens of millions of fans. With all of that, his life still came crashing down on him. He engaged in self-destructive and self-hating behavior, like his elaborate surgical modifications that transformed his good looks into a ghastly parody. He spent more than he made in mad plans to create a Peter Pan environment for the children he would bring into his care - including a private amusement park and zo - where they could live out elaborate fantasies of eating ice cream and watching movies at 2am in his private theater or racing around his private go-kart track. Even if the more lurid elements of these fantasy romps with children are not true - by which, of course, I mean the scandals of sexual abuse of children - he wasted his fortune in these bizarre creations and created the groundwork for his legal and financial troubles. Not to mention his drug abuse that was consistently abetted by the physicians around him, Demerol and morphine.
I am not nearly so handsome, wealthy or successful as Michael Jackson. And I believe I'm more successful introspective than he ever was. But I look at the bulk of his life and I fear that I won't be able to control myself, either. That the self-destructive behavior I consistently engage in, the sabotage of my own life that has largely seen my own talents squandered, my inability to form the social connections that are required for success, my own blue moods deep as the seas, and I realize that it is not inevitable that I overcome them. Michael Jackson, who had it all, could not.
So, Michael Jackson terrifies me. He was a brilliant artist, one of the greatest of the 20th century, and successful beyond most people's dreams. He was also mad. His self-destructive behavior was clearly rooted in the past he never escaped from. I have not escaped my own past and Michael Jackson's life demonstrates that the victory of sanity is not inevitable. |
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| Disinfosphere! |
[Jun. 25th, 2009|01:31 pm] |
In this article about the Twitter Iran event, the author creates my new favorite word: disinfosphere. He brings up what I consider to be a legitimate point - the Internet is providing (creating?) a lot of disinformation.
It's easy to see with a little thought experiment. Imagine some group you really hate, just the farthest out there fringe of fucked up examples of humanity. Maybe it's the guys over at Free Republic, or Westboro Church, whatever, just imagine the most fucked up people you can. The consider how their insanity and stupidity is reinforced by the websites that they frequent - rather than get any information that would move them to a more reasonable understanding of the world, they seek out the information that confirms them in their biases.
Of course, we all do this. After all, the article I just posted was from Counterpunch and not Fox News. But that is also the point. In addition to creating new expressions of information, the Internet also creates new expressions of bigotry, hatred and generalized stupidity. It creates disinformation. So I think it's pretty important to consider to what extent the Internet is a disinfosphere. |
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| Obama, cars and banks |
[Jun. 21st, 2009|09:26 pm] |
Obama's administration turned down requests from auto parts makers for $10 billion in loans. Obama's administration favors factor closings, work force reduction and pressing low wages on workers. This is the exact opposite of the $15 trillion in loans that have been given to the financial sector because the worst offenders are "too big to fail".
America just doesn't make anything, anymore. Now, it's official government policy. (The parts makers' problems is a natural and predictable outgrowth of two of the three Big Three automakers in bankruptcy. People who like cares like a stable company to buy from - it's a big investment and a business crapping out a year or two into your warranty stinks. Better to buy a car from a stable company. Duh. It is, apparently, effecting even the used car market. People just don't want to buy a car from a company that might not exist, anymore. But, no cars being sold means a reduced need for parts. This is absolutely basic and was predicted - the failure of the US auto industry is going to have economic impact waaaaaay beyond Chrysler and GM.)
Even above the various other boggles I have with corporate and crony capitalism that dominated the world, today, it just baffles me how short sighted this is for business in America, not to mention the country in general. It's like . . . the administration and business leaders still buy into the "New Economy". The Dot Com Crisis did not, apparently, end this bizarre notion that to make money you don't have to, well, produce anything. They don't seem to realize when the biggest economy in the world is strapped for cash, what you should not do is make people poorer. It makes no sense even from the incredibly limited view of governments and business. The world's economy is still in the business of making things. Banks, by themselves, simply cannot generate profit - because, ultimately, wealth exists because people make things. If you want to jump start the economy, give workers a damn raise. Then they go out and buy more things.
It's even possible to calculate the best wage to pay - the optimal point where paying more does not lead to an increase in consumption (not necessarily in the sense of buying more things, I should note, but in the sense of buying more things we want - many Americans would buy, say, locally grown foodstuffs if it wasn't too expensive to do it). The US radically underpays its workers. It's one of the key problems with the current economic problem - Americans have been living off of credit for a while now and the bill's come due. If America, and the rest of the world, paid workers what they were worth to the economy, they'd buy more. This is a well known economic fact - that poor people who are paid more buy more things. (It is also possible to calculate where if you pay someone so much that they just put it into investments instead of just buying more stuff - that way, we could largely avoid bubbles like the one we're sitll fighting off.) (It is also known that most people will not be satisfied, materially, with the things they have. Being well paid does not, generally, stop people from working. Working at crappy jobs makes people stop working! Low wages makes people stop working. It's easy walking away from a crappy, poor paying job where humiliation is part of the work. I'm looking at you, retail. And even if a certain fraction of Americans would opt out of the workforce entirely, in general there would just be a lot more need for work.
So, given that we could basically calculate the optimal wage for production - a wage that encourages people to spend materially but not so much where they put too much money into capitalist speculation - why don't people do it? Why doesn't the Obama administration fight to keep people working and well paid while they do it, as the best sort of capitalist tactic in this situation? I mean, I'm not even buggin' about the quasi-socialist stuff I'm into over here, but even with the normal logic of scientific capitalism, why is the US and US business slitting their own throat by impoverishing workers?
The only real answer I can see is power. If you paid Americans the optimal amount of money, which for many of them would be several times their current wages, what would happen is a bunch of previously disenfranchised people would bang on the table and demand a say - and they'd have the money necessary to organize. Rather than risk that, American (and to a large extent this is true everywhere in the industrialized world) business and government would rather create a huge gap between the rich and the poor, so the poor are too poor and tired to get engaged in politics. |
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| Food snobbery! |
[Jun. 21st, 2009|12:57 am] |
Today, I had a total food snob moment. I don't say that in a good way, hehe. I'm a pretty white trash guy and my cooking is heavily oriented towards turning cheap food into good eating, thus I'm heavily invested in stuff like grilling which often uses the cheapest cuts of meat like ribs and chicken thighs and such. But I got suckered today by a food snob.
I started brining a brisket to make corned beef. Since I'm almost out of salt, and the recipe requires a pound of it, I got the salt they recommended, some kosher coarse sea salt. But the first direction to making corned beef is dissolving the salt in water. At that point, it's all just NaCl. So, I overpaid on the salt by around 500%.
Certainly these cook guys know that salt is sodium chloride - and that's it. Even the fancy schmancy sea salt is well over 99% salt, it has some trace elements in it, sure, and might even be better for you on some level on that account, but taste-wise, dissolved salt tastes all the same. The sea salt, when dissolved, does not retain a distinct character to salt out of some pit in Utah. The sodium chloride molecules don't somehow remember that they were once fancy kosher coarse salt instead of plebian fine grained salt that never had a rabbi bless it. In some dishes, coarse salt provides a noticeable difference, certainly, and even tho' I overpaid by 500% doesn't mean that it's really expensive or anything, but the insistence on using expensive salt for a brine for one of the cheapest cuts of beef is just pure, unmitigated snobbishness. |
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| More on sausage! |
[Jun. 20th, 2009|12:18 am] |
The people who wrote Charcuterie are crazy people. They are all about properly emulsified sausages. I'm not going to be getting any sausage making things until Adrienne gets back, but I'm going through everything in the book because . . . I like to cook, hehe. Anyway, they talk about this test to do to see if your sausage has emulsified properly. You wrap a bit of the sausage in some plastic wrap and you poach it at just below a simmer and then you try it. If the sausage is mealy or you have a package of fat, well, it hasn't emulsified properly.
So, what do you do with this? They suggest you feed it to your pets, hehe. It is not fit for human consumption! |
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| Pork belly! |
[Jun. 15th, 2009|09:24 pm] |
I found a place that sells pork belly! Yes! I've ordered the curing salt and as soon as it gets in I'm going to make some maple cured bacon and some pancetta, assuming it doesn't get too warm (I probably should have started this stuff six weeks ago to get the temperature and humidity right). But . . . cha-ching! Pork belly! |
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| Cyber corruption in Cuba? |
[Jun. 15th, 2009|10:24 am] |
I was reading some news and came across this story about Antonio Castro and a cyber romance set-up. One of the Castro-haters in Miami set out to get into a online romance with Antonio Castro to try to expose the corruption of the Cuban ruling class.
Full disclosure, while I sometimes identify as a socialist and certainly yearn for a society in which work is controlled by the people who do it and not for the benefit of a business class, I don't think that the Castro regime qualifies as socialist or communist. It is my opinion that the central problem of any socialist or communist revolution is the tendency for those revolutions to become monarchies, with some Hero of the Revolution in absolute control. I can't think of a single socialist or communist revolution (as opposed to institutions of social democracy, against which I would level and entirely different critique) where some Big Man hasn't assume dictatorial powers. So, while I think that Fidel and Raul Castro have been as good of kings as kings can get, they are kings and any benevolence of their reign in sheerest coincidence. Plenty of these "communist" dictators turned out to be worse than what they fought. (That said, from where I sit, a Cuban king of Cuba is better than a Cuban puppet of American business interests, which is what they had after the Spanish-American War and the Revolution.)
So, what was the great corruption that was revealed by this online set-up? That Antonio Castro has good Internet access, an Apple computer and a Blackberry. That's it. That's the whole sum total of the corruption. The people who found it out are really trying to play it up, that Antonio Castro is living really high on the hog or something, when the corruption that was revealed was . . . Internet access.
I'm not saying that isn't corruption. But . . . that's it? The big secret of the Castro family is that they have laptops and Internet access? Really?
Not too long ago, on the other hand, the Obamas flew up to New York City for a "date". Whole sections of the city were closed down, not to mention that they traveled there in a private 747, the hundreds of Secret Service and New York cops that were used for security, etc., etc. In Paris, the Obamas repeated the extravagance so their family could have some mockery of a normal outing. Each of these family outings cost hundreds of thousands of dollars paid for by US citizens. It is routine for US politicians to get taken on all kinds of junkets paid for by their "friends", y'know, who happen to be wealthy businessmen or whatever with homes in exotic places. Or that whole business with Berlusconi, flying teenage models for sex parties with the Czech head of state. Or British PMs bilking the public out of second houses and exorbitant rents on swank flats.
Of course, on the scale of corruption, even that is pretty low grade compared to, say, Bush II's torture program, f'rex, and Obama's cover-up of the Bush administration's crimes. Or wiretapping millions of people without a warrant. That's corruption: torture and widespread spying! And even above that is stuff is evil like, say, Joseph Kaliba, who supports the literally genocidal Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda or illegal and immoral wars of aggression that killed a million civilians (that's a Bush reference, BTW). You're deep into crimes against humanity territory, now.
So, on a scale of 1 to 10, it's pretty hard to see Antonio Castro's "corruption" as even rating a 1. It's a tiny amount of money and resources and it doesn't hurt anyone, it doesn't deprive anyone of their life or rights, it doesn't even inconvenience anyone. It seems to me to be one of those things that might backfire on the exile Cuban community because what it reveals is, if this is the worst they can come up with, that the Cuban government is shockingly free of corruption. And it makes them look kinna lame and deeply petty that they're so pathetic to frame these people that they'll sink to those kinds of cliched Internet traps. |
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| And then there was sausage! |
[Jun. 13th, 2009|11:27 am] |
I got a book on charcuterie, cleverly named Charcuterie, and . . . WOW, this stuff will kill you. I mean, okay, I know that all sausage is bad for you, as is all bacon, terrines and confits, etc., etc. But the academic knowledge of the awfulness of how "bad" cured meat is changed when you see what actually goes into it. It stops being academic. Still, the book was utterly fascinating. The prose occasionally got lurid (okay, I get it that you like pork!) but since the book is mostly techniques and recipes . . . well, I finished a good chunk of it in one sitting it was so fascinating.
I mean, take a pork belly confit as an example. You take a bunch of pork belly - six pounds - and cover it with salt and cure it. Then you put it in a Dutch oven and cover it with fat and cook it at 250 degrees for three hours. Then you store it in its protective coating of fat in the fridge. To serve, you take it out and warm it to room temperature and then you deep fry it. So, what you do is take pork belly, mostly fat, and poach it in fat and then deep fry it in yet more fat. That's the kind of book this is.
On the other hand, and the authors point this out, people who routinely eat fast food have the gall to look down on sausage? We'll gladly eat a pizza, loaded down with salt and fat, but then we don't have the nerve to look askance at a confit?! Which is insane, of course.
At the same time, staring this in the face is . . . wow! Just looking at all of it in the face is just a little weird.
But Adrienne is interested for me to explore this world of pig fat, hehe. She points out that none of my cooking experiments have gone too awry (sometime I might make a lousy dish, but overall it's been pretty splendid for us). So, it looks like we'll be getting a meat grinder and a sausage stuffer and either a smoker or a smoke box for the grill.
Since she leaves for GDF today, I was looking for some projects to do while she's gone. I was thinking of making my own bacon - makin' bacon! Not just reg'lar bacon, but perhaps also a cured Italian bacon. I'll also brine a chicken or two. Stuff that doesn't require too much additional equipment, to get an idea of how all of this works. The authors of Charcuterie say that store bought bacon stinks on a lot of different axes, so I suspect I'll be using that as a measure of the utility of this book. |
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| Obama's health plan stinks |
[Jun. 11th, 2009|02:21 pm] |
Obama's health care plan is, simply put, stupid. It won't work. Excuse me, not only will it not work, it hasn't worked. Eight states have tried the plan that Obama is pushing, of a state insurance agency that purports to give affordable health care to "all", including, in my personal experience, Maine when I was living there.
It didn't work in Maine, or any one of the other states that have tried it, including Massachusetts, Tennessee, Washington, Oregon, Minnesota or Vermont. In all those states, the government's plan of a state run insurance agency has failed to reduce the number of uninsured (with the exception of Massachusetts where the plan basically translated into increased expenses by the state subsidizing existing insurance plans) and doesn't address the problem of underinsurance, which is absolutely endemic from something like one-third to one-half of people who are technically insured (depending on what you mean by underinsured; almost no Americans are fully insured, though, and in the case of a catastrophic sickness or accident will likely lose everything).
So, the plan will fail. Indeed, I believe it is designed to fail - it is a bone to toss to Americans, after which the government can say, "Oh, well, we tried and it was just too expensive and didn't work." It'll probably hold the lid on the insurance thing for another decade, just like the Clinton's failure before it (which ushered in the era of HMOs - that's what we got instead of universal coverage; the insurance industry promised a "market based" solution to rising health care costs, which was the era of "managed health care" which has not only see radical increase in costs but also a dramatic lessening of care). Since it's clear that managed health care is a boondoggle, now, this is the plan - a private corporation that is backed by government funding.
The plan, as described, is that anyone will be able to trade in their existing insurer for the new government one, if the government insurer has a better deal. This is supposed to be a goad to create that "invisible hand of the market" that will supposedly drive down health care costs . . . though considering we already live in a world of competing insurers that seems to me to be an implicit condemnation of the capitalist model for health care, that even in competition the various insurers will cooperate to insure their megaprofits (which tends to happen when you're selling something that people absolutely need - health care costs go up towards infinity because people will pay anything to ease their pain; the whole insurance industry is depraved and should be destroyed utterly). But, still, the idea is to have one BIG health care provider that ANYONE can buy into, and it'll be SO BIG that it'll be able to lower prices in the way that, y'know, happens in countries with medical systems worth talking about (like Our Neighbor to the North).
It didn't happen anywhere else where this plan was tried. That's what I want people to take away from this. This plan has been tried and it does not work. To the extent that it "worked" in Massachusetts, it worked only because the government subsidized private insurers - which is, like, the worst of two worlds, the worst of taxation for health care combined with the worst of managed health care through an insurance company.
And here's the crazy thing. Well over half of all Americans (something like 62%) and well over half of all medical professionals (something like 58%) say that a government single-payer model ("Medicare for all") of the kind that Our Neighbor to the North has (which provides better care for everyone at about 2/3rds the cost) is the way to go. But in the debate about all of this, even people like Nancy Pelosi (whose San Francisco constituents very strongly support Medicare for all, far above the national average) have worked to keep single payer "off the table".
This is one of those crystal clear events that demonstrates how much both parties are wholly bought by big business. We've got two plans, Obama's which has been tried in eight states and either failed to help at all or simply ended up being a new way to fund private business (while STILL not insuring everyone) and the Medicare for all plan that would see a drop in prices, complete care for each and every American and is supported by well over half the population, y'know, 3 to 2. So, which one does the government work on? The first. Because, y'know, maybe THIS TIME it'll work. The magic insurance fairy will come along and sprinkle pixie dust on this plan, this failed plan, and it'll suddenly work. As opposed to this other plan that works in Canada and a bunch of other countries in the world, y'know, has demonstrated effectiveness at both cutting costs and improving coverage, not to mention that 62% of American citizens want it . . . but, y'know, that's not the one we'll even talk about. Who do our politicians work for, again?
But, my main point is that Obama's plan has been tried numerous times and not worked once. It will literally change nothing. But what'll happen is it'll be put in place (assuming that it isn't defeated, which it might be) and for the rest of Obama's administration he'll tell us to "give it more time" (as opposed to Medicare for all which would instantly become available) and then the next administration will say that the failure of the plan is another reason to not try Medicare for all because "universal coverage is too expensive and doesn't work". Mark my words.
My advice is that American voters should make health care a litmus test. If they don't support single payer, vote them out of office. Only then will they understand the seriousness of the issue. |
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| Charcuterie |
[Jun. 7th, 2009|11:58 pm] |
I made some pastrami - which is corned beef that's marinated in a spice rub and then slow cooked. I made the rub and did the grilling myself, natch, but I did not corn the brisket which was a touch of the problem. The meat had way more grist than the butcher's brisket I've bought in the past. Tastewise, the pastrami was great - save for all that damn gristle!
So . . . I think I'm going to learn to cure meat. Corn my own brisket. I've almost gone this direction in the past but always pulled up doing it because . . . well, we don't have a huge kitchen, or even a big one. Indeed, it's on the small side. And it goes down this road towards the madness of sausage making. Gadgets for grinding, packing, smoking, curing and drying meat.
I've hesitated long enough! Every time I've learned to cook something new it's been splendid for our diet. We eat better food for lower costs. It's been true of Indian food, beer, roast beef and a host of other things I've made for the household. I think now I am setting my eye on cured, smoked and dried meats. It's going to be mano-a-sausage. |
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| Pornography, consensualism and Revolutionary Boy Martin |
[Jun. 6th, 2009|04:19 pm] |
Today's story starts with pornography and moves on with post-democratic forms of government and ends with Revolutionary Boy Martin.
Though it might be difficult to imagine, today, at one time porn was a tiny, isolated and battered industry. It existed on the fringes of society and struggled to exist at all, and was most successful in its softcore forms like Playboy magazine - which leavened the porn with hundreds of pages of articles, so people could claim they "bought it for the stories". This kind of pornographic song and dance kept up until the Internet.
The Internet turned porn into a many tentacled monster. Sometimes literally. It is difficult to surf for any appreciable period of time without coming up against Internet pornography. You can be doing many a normal thing on the Internet and then, boom, you're staring at some young woman's colon. And not just the explosion of traditional forms of porn in the form of naked young women and disturbingly endowed men, but all that fanfic! A million stories have been written describing in graphic detail the love shared between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. Or Harry and Ron. Or Harry and . . . Snape?! Or Harry and Calvin from Calvin in Hobbes.
So, what happened and what does this have to do with post-democratic forms of government?!
Well, it's pretty widely agreed that the reason why porn took off is because you didn't have to go into one of those creepy adult stores that cities inevitably kept in the worst parts of town and look another human being in the eye when buying porn mags and movies. From the comfort and privacy of your own home, you can watch bukkake. From the relative anonymity of your computer, you can post your homoerotic fantasies about underage wizards. And then, because of the massive success and evident popularity of these media types, they start to become more mainstream. There are conventions of slash writers, furries who are involved with the sexual aspects of it, not to mention the increase in size and attendance in pornography conventions. Porn actresses are starting to cross over into mainstream media. It wasn't until we couldn't see each other doing these things that we realized how many people wanted to do them - we realized we were not alone and came out about it.
For me, this is a big deal because one of the biggest problems in a more open and consensualist society is groupthink in whatever flavor you care to imagine it - the Bradley effect (not named for me, hehe), the spiral of silence, the bandwagon effect, all of the powerful social forces that encourage people to behave in ways that they would not, on their own, act. The tendency for people to "go along with the herd" is a problem for all variations of consensualism - anarchism, communism, socialism . . . even the right-wing ones like libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism (tho' I might argue that those are actually promoted by people who depend on groupthink to maintain their social advantages without having to expend resources to do it - they are rather serious perversions of consensualism - but I will imagine that at least some of their supporters actually believe that no government will lead to greater freedoms and not tyranny and thus suffer the problem of groupthink, too). Because in a society where a few people are the movers and shakers, the possibility of consensus becomes almost impossible because ambitious people will struggle to control the mechanisms through which groupthink operates.
(Clearly this all applies to democracy, too, and the current control of the media by reactionary right-wing elements demonstrates the nature of the struggle to control opinion leaders and use groupthink to popularize an agenda wildly against the interests of most of the people who end up supporting it. Since the Reagan Revolution, for instance, poor white Americans have consistently voted against their own interests because of the skill with which conservative Republicans controlled the opinion makers of poor white American communities. Democrats have adopted these techniques as their own. So all of this has political relevance even in our current situation. Democracy is, after all, a crude form of consensualism.)
The Internet, however, gave people the space and privacy necessary to make their own decisions about some things. Not important things, alas, because the power of the Internet to control public opinion was caught on pretty early - thanks to portals like AOL - so I feel that the Internet, as a force for social change, is overrated. Indeed, politically, I feel it is one of the best providers of groupthink. Almost all political blog articles are based on unattributed reference - often to the point of plagiarism - to a tiny number of big name blogs or big news sources. The more popular a blog, the more likely a culture will exist that is a highly effective groupthink mechanism. Even the trolls reinforce the groupthink by providing exaggeratedly comic examples of "other side" - trolls, by their very trolling, reinforce the dominate culture of the blog. And, yet, despite all of this, there are all those people buying all that porn, writing all that porn, and creating communities centered around what would have been unthinkable in the pre-Internet age. A few things got through before the ongoing clampdown.
What we learn, here, is that computer mediated communication can get people out of groupthink. This, I think, provides clues about how to get from our crude consensualism that is dominated by government and political bodies that own and control the opinion making process to a more sophisticated consensualism where people are free to make informed choices. I want to recreate, intentionally, what happened accidentally with porn . . . in politics and society.
What happened is that, from the obscurity of the early Internet, the freedom to get and create pornography allowed people to act according to their real preferences and desires. Not the preferences and desires as they existed in a community where groupthink had condemned pornography, but what they really wanted.
You can see this in voting with the Bradley effect - that's the tendency for people to lie in polls about who they'll vote for when race is a factor. When a pollster asks a bigot about race, unwilling to be thought of as a socially backward racist some of these people will lie. In the voting booth - in privacy - their bigotry plays out in voting selection. People act different alone and thoughtful than they do under scrutiny.
So, what is needed is privacy. Not just privacy in the sense that is often used in the Internet, that someone can't read your mail or store your history or whatever, but in the sense of being alone. This could easily be worked into computers - isolating people from even online friends and social networking sites and so forth and so on - but it would have to go beyond something as crude as simply trying to forbid users from using IM or going to Facebook. It would require the computer securing cooperation from the user. The computer would have to be able to communicate, "Don't you want to think about that?" in such a way that the user would agree.
That will take a robust robotic assistant, I feel. It has been conclusively demonstrated that humans can form emotional attachments with just about anything. Fictional characters, robots, colas for crying out loud - Coca Cola has created a multi-generation loyalty to its product! For soda pop. So, humans can form emotional attachments to anything. (Specifically, dating sims have thousands, maybe millions, of people trying to please a robotic girlfriend who is just a shill for some corporation to suck money out of them. I'm talking something a lot better than that.)
What I'm visualizing is a robotic assistant - even if it's just an online construct - that has developed a meaningful personal relationship with its user. It would be necessary for us to like the robot and want to please the robot to, roughly, the same extent that we would want to please a meatspace human. But instead of being some drone to convince you to buy expensive company products a la the dating sim model, this robot would - egolessly, patiently and with the appearance of great compassion - help us to become more like the people we want to be. So, Chris' robot would remind me - gently - that I spend too much time playing video games and not enough time weightlifting. It would explore techniques to help me stop overeating, perhaps reminding me to make more of my own food, and to use less red meat when making it, encourage me to buy healthy stuff.
And, importantly, it would help me create a space into which I can do my own thinking, free of distractions. It would bring up alternate modes of thought after I've had time to consider things intelligently. Things like that.
Which puts me right where Masamune Shirow was with bioroids in the 80s. Ah, to reinvent the wheel! Well, my version would have less apocalyptic cyborgs.
Also, I don't think that the computer brains that control all of these would even have to be remotely Turing compliant (even beyond my thoughts that the Turing test is weak). One of the important things to remember is that this kind of simulation is already being used to bilk people out of geld - those dating sim games. My model - and this is where Revolutionary Boy Martin comes in, because I think that this could be done now, really, especially with those of us who basically live online - is an open source model. You'd start with something like a personality survey to figure out what "kind" of person you are. You'd describe what it is you're looking for out of the robot - do you want to lose weight? Meet girls and/or boys? Learn how to weld? - and then the robot would try to get you to do those things, occasionally questioning you how well it's doing. The individual users would, themselves, offer suggestions to the robot. So I might tell my robot to make a terrible noise if I open the fridge too often, to try to condition myself in a Pavlovian way. (Of course, this would require a sensor on the fridge.) If it worked, I'd say so and then all of this would go to a database where other people with the same goals might try it, too, and rate it, and so forth and so on. As people tried new things, extending both the personality surveys and refining the tools for accomplishing ends, it would improve in quality.
And SOME of the goals might be, y'know, political. Like, "Create a leftist consensualist paradise". Of course, other people might want to create an anarcho-capitalist paradise. This is a truth with all anarchism, I suppose, is that you've got to seriously let everyone, even the obviously evil and/or stupid, get a fair shot. (After all, an anarcho-capitalist thinks I'm evil and/or stupid, right?) Different people with different personality profiles would do different things, which would then be correlated across the system . . . so, a wannabe writer with moderate to severe social anxiety could work for a consensualist paradise from the point-of-view of writing subversive young adult novels, whereas an extroverted guitar player might write albums with titles like The Battle of Los Angeles, but still work towards the same goal. It could be expanded into a social network thing a la Facebook but with a mind to make yourself a better person (or, at least, more like the person you want to be).
If this system could be made as effective as those technologies that convince lonely Japanese men to give expensive virtual gifts to their crazy sim girlfriends, I think it could transform the world. At least in fiction. ;)
In the end, I have no idea what this post was about, but it sorta helped. Though in what I'm not exactly sure. |
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| Sometimes research feels bizarre |
[Jun. 4th, 2009|12:18 pm] |
For Revolutionary Boy Martin. I've spent the past several hours reading the TV Tropes website about the various anime that are, in part, inspiring RBM (stuff like Mai-HiME and Code Geass). Several times I've almost started to do "real research" but stopped because, well, this is real research.
The research for Simon Peter really felt like research. It was reading history and religious texts, beardy stuff, heavy. This feels a little too much like play, sometimes. ;) |
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| Horrors of war, 21st century edition |
[Jun. 1st, 2009|10:13 am] |
News from Pakistan
The US military in Pakistan is paying locals to plant electronic devices that are then used to destroy the target, or so the Guardian says.
The article is a bunch of filth, really, talking about how wonderful drones are but glossing over the horrific facts of the weapons. While it's true they are accurate in the sense that they're hitting their targets, the article doesn't bother to examine what targets are being selected and the people who are selecting them. (Except, almost paradoxically, to point out the risk the people placing these locaters are under from people who might, y'know, object to them fingering buildings for remote control destruction.) The attacks are launched "hours or days" later, so they're not actually targeting a person, but a building, a "farmhouse". Who's in the farmhouse? Who knows. It's just where some sketchy character - a person who is accepting money to act as an assassin of his neighbors, mind you, not precisely a great character reference - planted the locater. Then, hours or days later, some drones come along and blow the place to hell. Which does go a fair way to explain why sometimes weddings and the like are attacked - they're just targeting buildings fingered by some guy who lusts for American money. The military has no reliable way of knowing who's inside of them and, apparently, little interest.
This is pretty infamous. This is just . . . just sick. It's target\ting houses blind in the hopes that someone worth killing is inside and without regard to whomever else might happen to be there, like little kids and other non-combatants. It is also illegal, an attack on civilian infrastructure out of proportion to the military threat (which is completely unknown because, I feel, of the unreliable character of the people placing the locators). Most drone attacks kill civilians and largely civilians and while we might dismiss that as "collateral damage" there's another word for it - massacre. And beyond that yet another term: "war crime".
Most of the article is just a sick glorification of these "targeted assassinations" - tho' they are clearly nothing of the sort, as before the weapons are fired there is no effort made to verify who is or is not at the location, they are indiscriminate targeting of civilian homes - but this is the wave of the future, which is going to suck for people on the business end of these weapons.
Crazy weapons talk
I am also coming to feel that the US military is basically designed to fight wars where the presumption is we'll be fighting people with basically no technological infrastructure. We have a whole lot of weapons whose use against foes who do have a noticeable technological infrastructure - ranging from air craft carriers to huge standing armies. Do we think these forces are useful in the modern world? Really? Against foes that might actually be able to fight back?
F'rex, those drones are controlled from an Air Force base north of Las Vegas. If we use drones against, say, China, what if China decides to attack the control infrastructure . . . in Nevada. They've got weapons that can do it. ICBMs do not need to be armed with nuclear weapons, after all, and it'd be hard to complain about China attacking US soil if that's where our weapons are being controlled from. So maybe they'll start peppering Las Vegas with ICBMs with, I dunno, thermobaric weapons.
Or even stuff like aircraft carriers - China has cruise missiles with five hundred mile ranges and satellites that can see our ships. Their cruise missiles are fast and pretty stealthy. By the time they've been seen, well, they're moving too fast to shoot down before impact. China would find it pretty easy to send our carrier groups to the bottom of the ocean. And, of course, every country in the world is paying really close attention to this drone thing. Drones are . . . they're cheap as weapon systems go and can be built with the technology present in any industrial nation on earth with ease.
The reach of weapons has grown so incredible, amongst nations with advanced technological infrastructures, that these tanks and carrier groups and military bases with armies and such present nothing but targets for incredibly destructive long range weapons that are not nuclear. For drones with nearly zero radar profile firing missiles pretty much anywhere, or hypersonic cruise missiles that can turn aircraft carriers into irradiated scrap metal (who the fuck thought it was a good idea to put nuclear reactors on boats people are going to be shooting at?!), or SRBMs, IRBMs and ICBMs that can target things pretty much anywhere on earth. Almost all of the US military is built to fight wars along the lines of World War II, where the reach of weapons was pretty limited and while air power could and did decide naval engagements, big armies of tanks and trunks and soldiers carried the ground. But the weapons of the 21st century are gonna ignore planes, tanks and soldiers. They're going to be deployed against any concentration of military significance anywhere on earth - and if the control structures of these weapons are distributed amongst the country, then the whole country must be attacked in order to meaningfully fight the war. Even without nuclear war, this would happen. Intercontinental weaponry will be used to attack power installations, communications centers, ports and airports. Unable to attack a distributed electronic command structure, they'd necessarily attack the infrastructure to that system. Folks, that's us and those things we need to stay alive.
But it's like . . . I mean, is anyone talking about this stuff other than a few guys on the Internet? That's not rhetorical! If people in positions of power are talking about it, I'd like for them to talk a little louder so I (and other people) can hear it.
My take on all of this is that war must be ended. Nuclear weapons are terrifying, but so is all this other stuff. Robotic weapons raining death on people from a world away is spooky. The only way to end a war between industrial nations is to destroy the industrial and communications infrastructure that make war possible and . . . nowhere is safe, anymore. And is the nature of technology, this stuff is getting cheaper and more accessible - particularly the nuclear manifestations of it (which is the patient zero of this disease - the urge to project military force with little risk anywhere in the world with devastating consequences actually ends up putting the whole world in the firing line). North fucking Korea has nuclear bombs and ICBMs! Shit! They have missiles that can reach California. We hit them there and North fucking Korea can hit back - here, where I'm at, on the California coast. Oh, sure, it'll be another five or ten years before they can put one of their H-bombs on their ICBMs - in the meantime, y'know, they might be able to make Seoul into a smoking nuclear ruin if we try anything. Which is what they, or any other nation invaded by the subsequent smaller, smarter versions of ICBMs that we call drones and cruise missiles and such, will do if they have no chance of winning a war against our remote control weapons. They'll turn Seoul or Tokyo or LA into a ruin. North Korea knows it can't win a conventional battle against the US - particularly given that the US is now sending in remote controlled weapons to do its killing and it's way cheaper to replace a drone than a soldier, not to mention destroyed drones don't create as much instability at home because it doesn't require a draft and doesn't get our soldiers killed - so they're turning to weapons we fear but, due to the march of technology and the natural trend for technology to become accessible to more people, to become cheaper and better faster and faster, can now be built by any country willing to turn themselves into a giant factory to do it.
While, on the other hand, it seems to me that the US and, well, right now, everyone, but certainly NATO, are building military measures based on paradigms that are simply antique - which, on a personal level (because if any country is going to be burned by this changed military paradigm, it's the US because we get involved in more foreign wars than anyone else and have more international enemies than anyone else which means when it goes bad the bombs will be falling on the heads of people I know; my mom lives four blocks away from the entrance to Nellis AFB, f'rex) is bad for me but also idiotic from even a limited military perspective. Because, sure enough, it'll be nuclear today and drones tomorrow - but in the end, if what it comes down to is every country on earth being able to hit every other country on earth, in the end it'll be nuclear because that's the knockout punch of those kinds of weapons and the first people who are interested in projecting power abroad are going to build.
So, all this money we're spending and this national mythology that we're building as a great warrior people is all just gas. Dangerous gas. I hope we can wake up from this murderous juvenile power fantasy before we hurt any more people and are hurt, badly, ourselves. |
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| The oldest PR campaign, or, thanks, Homer |
[May. 30th, 2009|12:02 am] |
So, why are soldiers so far beyond ordinary moral considerations? What is it about the act of soldiering that makes it so people consider it uncouth to criticize soldiers even when they're involved in godawful wars?
In short? Advertising works and soldiering is pretty much the oldest brand in the world. There isn't a single nation I can think of that doesn't have as their national literature some sort of war story, stuff like the Iliad, the Mahabharata or the Shahnameh. Before the modern world, history was, itself, almost entirely military history - the history of wars and conquerors. This isn't surprising, given that until quite recently pretty much every nation in every corner of the world was ruled by some form of military aristocracy (and still is in far too many places). Pretty much the national identity of everyone on earth is shaped by these narratives - we remember Achilles, King David, Rostum and Arjuna. We mostly don't even care about the people who lived simply during those times except to the extent that the loved or hated their rulers - even when the benefits of those lives were epic in scope, such as all those doctors who created modern medicine.
The more difficult answer is . . . we live in the world created by the Lord of the Flies. It was only recently that I felt the allegory of the novel Lord of the Flies (as opposed to having an intellectual understanding of it) and then only because I came across this easy to read chart that showed life expectancies over the period of human development. During the great bulk of human history, during the 250,000 years or so of the Stone Age, median life expectancy was in the middle fifties - civilization, on whole, is just about now reaching that level. During the Bronze Age it was about eighteen. The translation here is that what we call civilization was literally created by teenage boys, by the Lord of the Flies. We are the children of those shipwrecked youths, robbed of adult supervision by plagues created by civilization - sure, human population density skyrocketed in the Bronze Age as they had short but fecund lives, but imagine a world where your parents died before they could properly teach you anything at all, and their parents had died that way, too. Humans in the Bronze Age grew up in howling moral voids. The ones who succeeded were the ones who climbed over the backs of their peers and got to the top of the pyramid (in an almost literal sense) - they were selected for, really, their lack of morality in fulfilling their ambition even beyond the ethical vacuum left because all the adults dying generations ago. The Bronze Age was bleak, filthy, ignorant and violent. Indeed, selecting for violence. Since pretty much all Bronze Age civilizations were military aristocracies, it was the most ruthlessly violent people who made the rules. And the first rule was, unsurprisingly, to glorify their murder and conquest.
This glorification was monstrously successful. Our entire civilization, what we think of when we think of civilization, is dominated by state sponsored violence. So entrenched and powerful is this feeling, I think, that even when it is clear that military violence is a big problem rather than blame the people who do it, we shift the blame off to politicians . . .
This is a surprisingly ancient narrative, I should add. The idea that the benevolent military dictator (read: king) doing bad things as a result of evil ministers is, I am sure, familiar to everyone. It's always the evil minister/vizier/palace eunuch that's really the cause of all that misery. If only the king wasn't deceived and so forth and so on. It's a very long standing tradition of military aristocrats to blame others for their faults. A king does something idiotic and people suffer, well, you hang a couple of powerless ministers and assure the people the evil has been purged from the government.
Advance this to the modern day and not only do most people not blame the grunt on the ground who was firing the weapons that destroyed Fallujah, they don't blame the general in charge of the shooting match, either. Like that grunt on the ground, they were just following orders from the evil civilian government and it would be wrong for an officer to even criticize the government much less disobey and order . . . no matter how clearly illegal and immoral that order is. (Which, of course, ignores the fact that almost all officers are quite willing accomplices to military violence. Hell, nearly all of the military officers who publicly criticized Bush's "plans" did so not on the grounds that they were illegal and immoral but that they were stupid in a strictly military sense.) It is almost impossible to legitimately criticize soldiers.
So deeply inbred into our collective psyches does this goes that even the German Army during World War II is generally honored, even though it invaded dozens of countries and was responsible for the deaths - murders - of millions of people. It's okay to criticize the SS, even grudgingly the Waffen-SS, but you can't say nasty things about the Wehrmacht! They were honorable people, don't you know, who, y'know, killed millions and millions of people in illegal and immoral invasions. But it's the politicians' fault.
I feel the worship of the military has its roots in the Bronze Age and a bunch of violent children invented civilization by killing anyone who got in their way and enslaving the rest. Then they ordered the poets to write about them in the most glowing terms possible and killed anyone who talked bad about them. They did this for about five thousand years. We are the children of that legacy of war and propaganda - but it's ingrained in our bones. It'll take centuries, maybe eons, before we're free of it. Kings are as dead as god, but like god they're gonna cast a mighty long shadow. |
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